The standard two-variable chi-square test is typically consistent for all alternatives to independence, but effectively treats the data as nominal which may lead to loss of power for ordinal data. Alternatively, a test based on Kendall's tau does take ordinality into account, but only has power...

We propose a new method to test conditional independence of two real random variables $Y$ and $Z$ conditionally on an arbitrary third random variable $X$. The partial copula is introduced, defined as the joint distribution of $U=F_{Y|X}(Y|X)$ and $V=F_{Z|X}(Z|X)$. We call this transformation of...